


An occupation for a man

by Lilliburlero



Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault, The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: 1930s, 1970s, Consent Issues, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Hearing the Chimes at Midnight, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Missing Scene, Mother-Son Relationship, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, References to Shakespeare, School, Stealth Crossover, Theatre, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 17:50:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5465504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To put it fairly lightly, Julian Fleming has a vexed relationship with Shakespeare's <i>Henry IV</i> plays.</p><p>***</p><p>Note: period-typical homophobic language and attitudes, fairly extensive but very inexplicit discussion of underage sexual activity at English public schools (with attendant power and consent issues), sexual approach of a 16-year-old by a 19-year-old (canonical, but canonical plus, not minus), canon-typical family dysfunction, brief reference to PoW experience in the Second World War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A very valiant rebel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Naraht](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/gifts).



Marlow turned from the small study fire, his pitted, but somehow prepossessing face rendered a positive firebrand by its heat. ‘Good Lord, Blake, you look cheap. Would a crumpet help?’ He waggled the toasting fork in his hand.

‘Crumpet, Jonathan, is the _problem_.’ 

Marlow winced, flicked the toasted article expertly onto the plate on the hearth and let the fork drop with a clang. He vacated the winged armchair and motioned his friend to sit, fetched the only unchipped teacup and saucer from the cupboard, drew the bent-cane desk chair up to the fire and straddled it. He leaned down to the teapot on its trivet, filled the cup with stewed, mahogany liquid and handed it over, gesturing at the milk jug and sugar-bowl on the side table. 

‘Right, what has the vacuous little tart done now?’ 

‘ _Nothing_. And please, don’t call him―’ Blake sipped, agonised. 

‘Sorry. But you must see. Either he’s stringing you along, in which case he _is_ , like it or not, or he _isn’t_ , in which case it’s futile.’ 

‘There is a third possibility.’ 

Marlow rubbed his brow and rolled his eyes. ‘Just―just about, remotely. But Malcolm, are you sure you want―’ 

‘Damn it all, can you doubt it?’ 

‘I was going to say the trouble.’ 

‘I can handle it.’ Blake put down the cup, his hand quivering slightly. ‘I think.’ 

‘Good. As long as―look, just tell me, all right?’ 

‘He’s extraordinary. Miraculous. I’ve never seen anything like―’ 

‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ Marlow sighed. ‘Those are going to turn into pure Dunlop if we don’t―’ he leaned expansively back and withdrew a butter dish and knife from the innards of the hacked bureau. ‘There’s a patch of damp on that wall, keeps it cool,’ he said in explanation, ‘and of course Flint―will eat things for a bet, you know. He’s quite clean otherwise. Writes verses, but doesn’t show them one. Sorry, you were saying, about―’ 

‘He’s exquisite. Perfection. I don’t mean just―’ Blake vaguely sketched a profile in the air. 

‘―but a crisp, vivid, athletic specimen of the genus―’ 

‘No, for Christ’s sake, Jon, listen to me. He’s actually _good_.’ 

‘―clean of limb and of mind, lacking any trace of morbid sensuality or sentimentality, yes, I know, here―’ he offered a buttered crumpet on his own saucer. 

‘I don’t want―’ Blake roared, starting forward as if to knock it from his hand; Marlow, whose reflexes were all one might expect in a falconer and licensed pilot and then some, whisked it lazily to safety and took an ostentatious bite, ‘―a _bloody_ crumpet.’ Blake sank back into the armchair. ‘I mean, he can really act. I’ve never seen anyone as good off the professional stage. He doesn’t just take his own part well. He supports the others too. Even brings out the best in the Fat Owl.’ 

Marlow munched and swallowed. ‘That’s― _good_ , isn’t it? Damn joke, trying to produce Shakespeare in this hole. At least if they’d let you do something modern―’ 

‘Well you know what happened when I tried that.’ 

‘Honestly, Malc. You might have known _Journey’s End_ wasn’t going to be a goer. All that anti-jingo speechifying, no girls’ parts. You should have done that Ruritanian romp, circa 1910, buckets of blood and plenty of type-casting―’ 

‘I would sooner,’ Blake said with conscious dignity, ‘have stuck pins in my eyes. But to get back to the point, of course it’s good. ’S wonderful. ’S _marvellous_ ,’ he added satirically. 

‘But?’ 

‘Well, you know when a bloke’s doing something he’s frightfully keen on and good at, even if he’s nothing very special in the looks department, he becomes―’ 

‘Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. My cousin’s sister-in-law was once heard to remark that,’ he assumed an elaborately confidential treble, ‘ _when_ young Johnny flies one of those _terrifying_ birds, he gets very _near_ ly _al_ most _ra_ ther nice-looking.’ 

‘The rotten b―’ 

‘Don’t think she cared madly for Little Sis snagging a fella first. But the thing is, she was right. Pam took a snap of me with Tarquin and I _did_ look close to human in it. So I can imagine what an effect strutting around being the delinquent Prince of Wales has on the kid.’ 

‘It’s hopeless. We just did Five, Four for the first time, and I could barely hold the rapier for trembling, let alone coach him.’ 

‘He kills you, doesn’t he?’ 

‘Yes, Marlow. Yes, he does.’ 

Jon thoughtfully buttered another crumpet. ‘And there’s a stupendously touching bit where he cradles you in his arms as you expire, talking fearful rot about high sparks of honour and shedding a single manly tear?’ 

‘ “High sparks” is in Richard Two. But yes. You see the difficulty.’ 

‘Some types would find it their great opportunity.’ 

‘So would I, if I could just be sure of him. I’m not a plaster saint. Sometimes I’m all but certain, when he lowers those _astonishing_ black lashes and smiles―oh, I don’t know. Frank and open but very particular and intimate too.’ 

‘Mm, but who passed without much the same―’ Marlow murmured. 

‘But then some lout might talk smut and he―you wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t watching closely―he pulls himself in, sort of. Withdraws the hem of his garment. But it’s not priggish, he doesn’t mind the bawdy in the play a bit. In fact, he came up with a rather subtle bit of business for _an otter, Sir John?_ off his own bat. Just a fairly firm preference, like a chap who likes scrambled eggs but can’t abide them fried.’ 

Marlow absently licked his greasy thumb and forefinger. ‘Bit of a gloomy vista, I’m afraid. Not an innocent or a prude, certainly not a beast and not a tart. That leaves incorrigibly normal―by the world’s standards, rather than those of this dump―which I admit doesn’t seem all that probable in his case, but it has been known to happen.’ 

‘There was that Ulsterman when we were in the Fourth, d’you remember? Shared a study with Sharpe, for Christ’s sake, tall, rather foppish, handsome apart from the teeth―’ 

‘Malone, and as a matter of fact there wasn’t. Recited the Pervirgilium Veneris to me after. Sounded dashed queer in that brogue of his. I was _hoping_ for meringues.’ 

‘Really?’ exclaimed Blake, startled out of self-absorption. ‘You kept that quiet.’ 

‘Better part of valour, ain’t it, squire?’ Marlow wheezed, approximately Cockney. 

‘That’s not what it _means_ , you might as well quote Iago on morals―but God, Marlow, what am I to do? Two nights of rehearsals a week until Easter and three nights after; it’s insupportable. I _must_ have him. I’ll go stark staring otherwise.’ 

Jon regarded him sceptically, over imaginary spectacles. 

‘I’m serious. All the symptoms. Can’t sleep or eat or work. I blush and stammer like a parson in a brothel, steam and sweat like a Grand National winner whenever he’s within twenty yards. He actually asked me if I thought I could be coming down with something―’ 

‘Filthy cheek. We’re a damn sight too free and easy with the little twirps.’ 

‘No, it was very natural and solicitous, and quite knowledgeable about the effects of a bad influenza on the vocal cords, too.’ 

‘Oh Malc. The last thing I want to do is jaw you, but―’ 

‘You’re going to lay on like the Head with a hangover―’ 

‘No, I hope not. It’s not the risk that bothers me. Die of boredom without it. It’s the responsibility angle. And if you think of the chaps who have been shown the tradesman’s entrance―not Cornford, he really was a kleptomaniac―what they all had in common was a positive addiction to responsibility. They weren’t brutes, brutes never get caught. They were finer made, in fact, than the average run of us: they found the typical conduct of affairs both sordid and saccharine, and they were right, of course. It was their high ideals that made them do the most ludicrously perilous things: mucking about with the normal ones, side-tracking them really, falling in love.’ Marlow uttered this final phrase with the air of one disposing of a sticking-plaster crusted with with scab and matter. ‘You are in love with him, aren’t you?’ 

Blake gulped and nodded. ‘I think so. ‘S what it feels like.’ 

His didactic obligation discharged, Marlow’s compact frame seemed to relax, becoming, for him, almost languid. ‘Mutton and mint sauce, then.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘What you might as well be hanged for, though yours is all spring lamb. Not even a whiff of hogget about _that_. What’s his Christian name, do you know?’ 

‘Julian.’ 

‘Hm. Julian Fleming. Even sounds celluloid, like his real one is Derek Drains or something. Good luck, anyway.’ 

‘I don’t believe in luck.’ 

To Marlow, whose ancestors since the Conquest had either farmed or gone to sea, this was sacrilege of the deepest dye. But he said nothing, only smiled, as he resolved to break the habit of a school career to see―as far as was in his power―that neither Fleming nor his inamorato should come to grief.


	2. No boy's play

Julian woke almost an hour before the bell, and spent it in fervent supplication to some entity not quite identical with that to be addressed later in chapel. Let everything be all right, he begged, let it not be one of those days when something is wrong and she hates me. He should have written to tell her, as he had meant to in the joyous wake of getting the part, but he hadn’t known quite how to phrase it, and had put it off for his next letter. After five more weeks of twice-weekly procrastination came the Easter vacation; he spent the first half of it staying with a friend, and when he returned home the words came no easier from his throat than they had from his pen. By the beginning of the Summer term the thing had become impossible, it was too late to retail as news; it must be a lovely surprise.

His confidence in this approach had slowly grown. She did enjoy the theatre: she went to the West End three or four times a year to see the hits that Julian had recently begun to find garishly conventional. She would surely be pleased, even delighted, to see him not merely competent, as he was at games and most work (except mathematics) but outstanding―that was a dreadfully conceited thing to think, but hadn’t Blake said, after the perfectly disastrous dress two days ago, that he was the genuine article, a star who had the rare gift of supporting an ensemble, if anyone could hold the whole horrendous mess together it was him. _Blake_ , whose highest accolade was a gruff _not bad, no notes_ , had said that, and squeezed his shoulder, smiling; then looked away, shaking his head, and said _you’re too good, kid. Too good for a chancer like me, anyway._ Julian had made suitably modest noises, but he knew he was already better than Blake, who had nonetheless acted in a semi-professional company―and surely she would see it too, and he would revel in her approbation as in the sunlight glowing through the unlined dormitory curtains. 

Misgiving scythed at him again; she did not really like to be surprised even by agreeable things, and moreover, to be outstanding at something meant just that, to stand out, and standing out was drawing attention to oneself, the cardinal cause of her withdrawals of love. But it was too late now, the day had come, it was the day itself, _dies ipse_. It was no better in Latin; uncomfortably close to _dies irae_ , in fact. He fell then into a hazy, enervating doze, fiery faces billowing and dissolving before his eyes. The clamour of the rising-bell found him heavy-footed and sluggish, falling behind in the scramble for ‘sluices.’ 

In this fourth decade of the twentieth century, the boys were no longer expected to achieve physical cleanliness at these outlets which had given morning ablutions their name, half-a-dozen gaping copper pipes situated for maximum lack of accommodation to the human frame above a tiled gutter. But they remained, cut off and spotted with verdigris, mementoes of a hardier age in a bathroom still hilariously inadequate to the demands placed upon it by forty adolescent bodies. By the time Julian arrived it was a hell of shouts, steam and soap scum, each of the four baths occupied by a wallowing person of consequence and trailing a line of lesser beings desultorily ragging one another. Latecomers usually gave up and did the best they could at the basins along the farther wall, but he could not do that, not today, not even at the cost of skipping chapel. Blearily, he joined the shortest and nearest queue, to a jeer of ‘Ooh, ‘ere’s Burlington Bertie, don’t he look green, boys? ‘Ave you gort stage fright, Bert?’ Someone else started whistling the tune. 

‘Keep working at it, Munby,’ Julian said affably, ‘and you might persuade your mama to put you on the stage.’ This riposte was well-received and the whistling ceased; Munby was a precocious member of the Second XV, but his tendency to presume upon this position into the Summer term was deprecated. Dangerously encouraged, Julian surveyed him from cow-pat coloured cow-lick to gnarled toes and added, ‘you’ve got the figure to make a hoofer.’ 

Obliquity of gaze in the bathroom was a complex matter. To avert one’s eyes was effeminate; to stare taboo even when solicitation was intended, but between these extremes lay shifting, but nonetheless highly regulated territory. The sense that Julian’s light grey appraisal, rather than his remark, had violated some clause in the wholly unspoken code was universal; which, and exactly how, was unclear enough to occasion a pause of infinitesimal duration and ringing tension. The occupant of the next bath over surfaced and shook a coarse, chestnut head. 

‘I’d say most people who actually have something to do on Speechers are conscious of a nervous system. And one in six is in a blue funk. I’m a blue funk type, myself.’ This admission from a First XI batsman who had undertaken solo powered flight allowed Julian graciously to own a nervous system. ‘This time tomorrow it’ll all be over, anyway. I know it’s fearful bad luck to say good―but honestly, I’ve always wanted to ask, you barnstormers don’t really say _break a leg_ , do you?’ 

‘I don’t know,’ Julian said simply, ‘I don’t know any real ones.’ 

‘Oh, from all I’d heard, sounds like you were born to it. Here,’ Marlow sprang easily out of the bath, ‘another splash of hot in there and it’ll be quite tolerable.’ Julian hesitated. Marlow paused in his vigorous towelling and said to the next in his queue, ‘You don’t mind, Archie, do you? Kid’s a big day ahead of him.’ Grieg, whose appreciation of _sprezzatura_ outstripped his _amour propre_ by a margin unusual among any population, let alone boys at school, made a small gesture of condescending renunciation. 

As Julian turned the tap and sank into water that was, in fact, on the tepid side of tolerable, though interestingly fragrant with Marlow’s dandyish vetiver soap, he risked a glance over the plump, determinedly oblivious form of Harris, a prefect of no distinction, at Munby, in whom anger and humiliation had heightened an already strong resemblance to a ridgling bull, and found it met with dilatory contempt. Julian did not wish to be anyone’s minion, and he did not particularly care to be thought Marlow’s; on the other hand, it was an association that, without any loss of virtue, had done his standing and influence no harm, and if baboons like Munby couldn’t haul their minds out of the sewer that was not his concern. 

Waiting on the broad, sweeping steps that led up to the front door―a spot strictly forbidden to the boys on every day except this and the first of the school year―Julian reflected that there were some terrors unknown to him: fathers who spoke openly of religion or were known to hold political views outwith the slender segment of Tory opinion sanctioned by school mores, who insisted on _entering into the life of the old place_ or wearing quite unsuitable ties; mothers who were either dowdy or brash in their hair, dress and make-up, or utilised vocabulary reserved to the young of their own sex. _Her_ clothes and coiffure were always smart and unobtrusively fashionable, her voice and comportment impeccable. She was beautiful, if a woman of forty could be beautiful (Julian had recently contemplated this question, to which he had yet to determine a firm answer, in solemn privacy); certainly the other fellows approved of her, and he should vicariously have enjoyed their endorsement. It was he who dreaded making a _faux pas_. 

She arrived at a minute past eleven; he stepped down to the car to hand her out, glad that in the Fifths and above, a certain unfussy demonstrativeness with one’s womenfolk was considered positive good form; he had missed being able to offer the first kiss. 

‘Hullo, dear, how delightful to see you,’ she said, returning it with an expansiveness which was almost too promising. Despite a sense of foreboding, he must tell her before she saw a notice or a poster. They were out of earshot of most of the boys and their families dotted about the drive, so he began, ‘I say, Mother―’ 

‘Fleming! All set for this afternoon?’ It was Hellier, the junior history master, who hoped with a manner excessively hearty and forthright to compensate for diminutive stature, thinning fair hair and consumptive complexion. 

‘Yes, thank you, sir. Mother, may I introduce Mr Hellier? He takes Lower School for history.’ 

‘How do you do, Mrs Fleming? Talented boy you have here, very talented.’ 

‘Really; I’m sure he does his best.’ 

‘And he does splendidly. Anyway, Fleming, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve fixed the follow-spot for “I know you all”―you know, it was throwing the most unaccountable shadow at the dress, like Dracula. Blake was quite upset about it. Don’t want the ladies fainting in the aisles, do we?’ 

Julian’s mouth turned dry and his palms clammy. He forced a weak giggle. 

She glanced disinterestedly over Mr Hellier’s shoulder and said, ‘I daresay that would be inconvenient. I wonder should those small boys be doing―whatever it is they are doing with that pillow?’ 

Whatever it was exactly, it certainly involved some spirited but imprecise impersonation of some choice moments from the Boar’s Head scenes. 

‘Oh―excuse me, Mrs Fleming―thank you. Some of my form seem to have taken temporary leave of their senses. The excitement of the day, and so on―boys! Boys―Stratton, there is a time and a place―’ 

A combination of habit and confusion made Julian start towards the side of the building and the doors normally permitted him. Not quite realising his mistake in time, he was obliged to lead her in an awkward parabola to the foot of the front steps. 

‘Julian, you seem _distrait_ ; do pay attention, dear. That man is new, isn’t he? What did he mean by―’ 

Marlow, strolling down the steps with the stateliness befitting his station, chose that moment to ruin the effect with a vault over the vase at the base of the balustrade from a standing start, landing at Julian’s side. It was a clean jump and not without elegance, but brought with it the sudden and worrying intimation that their near futures held an interview that would be deeply mortifying to both of them. It was a great pity that some men just couldn’t seem to contain themselves―he liked Marlow, who was jolly interesting about aeroplanes, and that that made it ten times worse. Marlow raised his cap. 

‘Hullo, Marlow. Mother, this is,’ the initials, J.L.N., were of course familiar from dozens of notices and the painted board beside a practically revolving study door, but three or four casual conversations about aviation had not yet vouchsafed the tutoyer mystery. He had left behind with his elevation to the Fifth the days when his mother accepted that Christian names were regarded with primitive horror, but since even an Olympian of nineteen was still to her simply a schoolboy in a cricket cap, he had nothing to offer in place of one. ‘―Marlow―my mother, Mrs Fleming,’ he finished feebly, as Marlow helpfully supplied, ‘Jon―Jonathan. How do you do?’ 

‘How do you do?’ 

‘I hope you enjoy the day, Mrs Fleming. There’s rather a lot of jaw to be sat through after luncheon, but we’ve reasonably high hopes of the afternoon’s entertainment. I say, Fleming, I just left Blake having absolute kittens, muttering about gobos and and flats and someone called Sykes. All gibberish to me. You could reassure him.’ 

Though she had dropped his arm, Julian felt her drawing herself in, as if she were collecting an invisible wrap. 

‘I―I’m sure he’ll be all right―’ 

‘It’ll do him good to see you. I’ll walk with you to Hall, if you like, and if you don’t mind, Mrs Fleming―’ 

‘Haven’t you to meet anyone from home, Jonathan?’ 

‘Quite all right―there’s only the Guv’nor and me, you see,’ Marlow said, cheerfully oblivious. ‘He’s a farmer, and he keeps hawks. If one of them gets up on the wrong side of her perch, that’s your morning right there, walking around with her on your fist, chucking and crooning at her whenever she bates off. So he doesn’t like leaving the old manor much.’ Julian blanched at Marlow’s saunter and his slang, which only a quarter of an hour before he would have thought appealingly casual, perhaps even worthy of imitation. They mounted the steps. ‘The dear old girls take a lot of placating, but you do get your money’s worth in interest.’ 

‘That sounds very satisfactory,’ she said, with a lack of warmth that Marlow registered in a smile and slight twitch of his eyebrow. Nothing much ruffled Marlow; he would soon find another line of conversation, perhaps more hazardous than the last. Julian’s stomach hollowed and his joints suddenly seemed stiff and brittle. These were far from ideal conditions under which to make his confession, but it could not reasonably be postponed even for a moment. 

‘Mother―look here,’ this peremptory approach, he saw immediately, had further estranged her, and cringed, ‘some of the chaps are putting on a―a show―after the prize-giving―’ 

‘I know, dear. It was in the circular the Headmaster sent―some scenes from Shakespeare, wasn’t it? I wonder if we shall spend a pleasant afternoon.’ 

Holding the front door for her to pass, Marlow telegraphed with hazel eyes that Julian noticed for the first time were not just good-natured and friendly but really attractive: _you monumental clot, you mean you haven’t told her?_

‘As a matter of fact, it’s the whole play. Henry the Fourth Part One.’ 

‘Really. Their―ambition is to be commended, I suppose. It isn’t a piece I know particularly well. Isn’t Falstaff in it?’ 

‘Yes, that’s right, but the thing is, Mother,’ he said desperately, ‘so am I.’ 

‘What? Do try to make yourself clear, Julian.’ 

‘I―I’m in it, the play, I mean―’ 

‘So―’ she said, coming nose-to-nose with the portable blackboard on which someone had pinned the play poster, the work of a classmate of Julian’s whose interest in Futurist lettering sat somewhat comically with his natural aptitude for a dashing, quickly reproducible thumbnail caricature. The planar structure of Julian’s face abetted the talent; the sketch of him dangling the crown dismissively from his little finger while he clinked tankards with a generic Falstaff was in every respect unmistakable. ‘―so I see.’ 

It was as if a sprocket had jammed in his mind’s eye, showing him her pale, leached-out visage jarring over and over, a ghostly, flickering recurrence. He heard himself say with an over-bright resonance, like a tin solider gifted with the power of speech, ‘I thought it would be a lovely surprise.’ 

‘It certainly is a surprise. Why didn’t you write to tell me what you were doing?’ He had never heard her voice sound like this before: flat, grating, razed of the usual sinuous contours of censure and distaste. As when one speaks for the first time in a learned language without inward translation from one’s mother tongue, a mental faculty that Julian had half-consciously trained slipped irrevocably into instinctual operation. There was no time for scruple or even volition: he recorded and absorbed the tonality for reproduction on stage; at that moment he not only became an actor but ended his chances of ever being anything else. 

‘―I wanted it to be―it was supposed to be a―a surprise,’ he repeated weakly. 

Marlow winced and wrung his cap in his hands. _Women unsettle him,_ Julian thought inconsequentially, _and the more polished the femininity, the greater his unease_. ‘I’ve watched some of the rehearsals, Mrs Fleming. Really not bad―I think the remarkable thing is that it’s a proper group effort, you know. You don’t often see that with amateurs of any kind, let alone at school. A couple of them hogging the limelight and the rest reading their parts off their cuffs, you know. This isn’t a bit like that.’ 

She relaxed, and with an almost uncanny rapidity recovered poise. ‘Yes, I suppose that is what startled me a little; school plays so often depend on one or two proficient children, who have their self-regard unpleasantly inflated as a result. An emphasis on ensemble playing is more wholesome, but unfortunately _very_ difficult to achieve.’ 

‘The producer doesn’t stand for temperament,’ Julian said, smiling his relief at Marlow in a way that he instantly realised he might come to rue, though just then he would happily have kissed him, ‘he’s a very sensible, normal person.’ 

Morning coffee, a tour of the school taking in exhibitions of gymnastics and pottery, a luncheon of cold meats, mayonnaises and salads and the drowsy encomia of prize-giving (Julian forestalled his enrollment among the athletic no-hopers by collecting House cricket colours) passed off with only the usual dole of social embarrassment. And then he was changing and making up in the theatre’s single, dank dressing-room (someone had rigged lightbulbs in the upper corners of the largest mirror, emphasising rather than mitigating the desolation), disengaging Bunting from the most extraordinary muddle of spirit gum and false whiskers, fastening him into his padding and reapplying, rather more crudely than he would have liked, the greasepaint that the ham-fisted clown had managed to smudge and smear all over his shiny, pimpled cheeks in the course of the first operation. 

Blake put a haggard face around the door and said _Beginners._ They shook hands in fervent silence. Julian knew better than to rehearse his opening speeches as they mounted the steps to the wings, but he did it anyway, discovering that his memory stopped dead at _dials the signs of_ what in God’s good name were dials the signs of? He must tell Blake he was sorry, he couldn’t do it, but Blake was in front of the curtain giving the _in case of fire_ spiel. Julian could smell his own sweat, acrid under the resinous odour of the makeup. The pulses at his temple and throat skittered, and his heart lammed like a bass drum. He could not go on. A fanfare sounded and the tab went up on the throne-room. _So shaken as we are…_ He must go on. 

Julian knew the first half had all gone all right, because he could remember nothing at all except that the miserable infant playing Francis had somehow contrived to come on stage left instead of right, and disconcerted by having to block his movements in reverse, was struck dumb except for _anon, anon, sir_ , with which he responded to all of the Prince’s lines. The effect of the scene was much the same, prompting Julian to the amused reflection that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had doubtless for some reason to accommodate a novice with a similar shortcoming. This brief reverie, conducted in the interstices of shaking the practically snivelling child from his sleeve with reassurances that no-one had noticed a thing, meant that he missed Blake’s scene with Glendower. Price, an unassuming person who asked nothing more of his days than the forlorn hope that they should pass without mention of Lloyd George or a lump of beef, had been cast upon a principle of pure necessity, and was capable of little more than pronouncing his lines at roughly audible volume. But the presence of an audience had inspired him to vocal modulation, and astonished but encouraged by their laughter, thence to comic timing. Blake came off for the interval, despite his best attempts at evading Nemesis by squashing Hubris, irrepressibly aglow. He clasped Julian’s forearms and offered a profane but highly complimentary assessment of his performance. Julian flushed slightly at the oath, which was not one he’d ever heard before in an educated accent. 

Of the second half he was more conscious than the first; it struck him with unnerving force that the feelings upon which he drew for his dialogue with the bitter, disappointed King were watched by someone who had been witness to their originals. Despite the melting heat of the lamps his fingers and toes stiffened as if with cold; his voice cracked on _I shall hereafter, my thrice gracious lord, be more myself._ Malcolm had always urged him, he thought mistakenly, to invest the line with more resolution; vindicated, Julian flung it all into a bloodcurdling vow of requital against Hotspur. 

Act Four belonged to Malcolm; Julian had only a few lines to exchange with Bunting, who was at least thoroughly enjoying himself. Malcolm was on form, indeed, on fire, which had the curious effect of magnifying what Julian considered defects in his interpretation. Without a return to Victorian romanticisation, he thought, it should surely be possible to suggest that in Hotspur blooms a branch of chivalry, the real thing, that is hard of hewing and homely as oak; that with him perishes a light not to be kindled again, perhaps ever in English history, for all later revivals were but will o’ the wisps. Julian found Marlow’s image momentarily before him, and only later wondered why it had been there. Malcolm prowled and snarled, he roared stammering defiance, but some airy headnote was missing, some crucial self-delight. Julian remembered that if he’d had his way with _Journey’s End_ , Malcolm would likely have played Stanhope to his Raleigh. How should she have taken _that_? 

Honour pricked Falstaff on and off, Worcester did his treacherous work―Malcolm and Julian had agreed that Hotspur, deep down, knows he has seen his last dawn, but Julian knew how to make an audience perceive it too, and wished he’d had the nerve to show Malcolm, who did it wrong and roughly. Blunt met a noble end, Julian was on again to exchange with Falstaff a flask of sack for a sword, and to rescue his royal father from the Douglas. Then―Malcolm caught his eye from the wings opposite, they shared an enormous grin and― _If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth_. Shakespeare’s genius lay in these too-obvious things, Julian thought, that no-one but he thought to do: delaying the meeting of the foils until ten minutes before the end. Then he lost himself in the mindless automatism of single combat. 

Malcolm lay heavy and hot across Julian’s thighs, suppressing his gasps to a minimum invisible to the auditorium. Julian felt a quiver of nostalgic affection for the time that they had spent practising this, in deference to Malcolm’s boyishly literal insistence that a stage corpse should above all not be seen to move or breathe. Malcolm’s makeup had dissolved; it ran in red-brown rivulets down the creases beside his mouth and stood in a sheet on his forehead. 

_But let my favours hide thy mangled face;_  
_And even in thy behalf, I’ll thank myself_  


They had worked out the obvious bit of business for this, Julian tearing the royal badge from his surcoat and laying it across Malcolm’s face, but he always considered that it lacked something vital, and now he knew what it was, if only he could bear to do it. It would make Malcolm jump, but that would be hidden in _Adieu_ and his brusque thrusting of the body from him as he turned away with a convulsive but quickly mastered sob. Malcolm of all people, should understand the need for the improvisation, and now it was thought of, it simply had to be done― 

‘For doing these fair rites of tenderness,’ he said, and pressed his lips to the nauseous ridge of spittle, sweat and greasepaint that was Malcolm’s mouth. He didn’t jump, but shuddered and groaned as if he really were breathing his last. The auditorium too seemed to sigh. 

Then just Falstaff’s resurrection, Douglas’s reprieve, and _all our own be won_. Julian had the queer sensation that the curtain was rising not on the actors but on the audience, an indistinct field of sentient turnips, bobbing up―Great God, they were on their feet. He could not see her; not once during the play had he thought to search. He came to his senses, grasped Malcolm’s hand and Bunting’s, took a final bow, then gestured to Malcolm as producer. They exited at opposite sides of the stage, so Julian reached the dressing room last, to cheers and a physical mobbing by those members of the cast with parts sufficiently important to be allowed to use it (spear-carriers strictly relegated to the gym block). 

He extricated himself and indicated Malcolm, who had stood back from the welcoming committee. ‘There’s the man you’ve to thank,’ he said, exchanging a fond grin with him. It was wonderfully natural now, with no condescension on Malcolm’s part or flattered gratitude on his. It would be agreeable if school life could contain more such moments of equality, but then, he supposed, the whole system would collapse. 

‘Piffle, dear boy.’ Malcolm threw an arm round his shoulder, and then releasing him, ruffled his hair. Julian felt slick and slimy all over, but by some unspoken consent he and Malcolm took off only their cumbersome knitted ‘mail’ and felt doublets, then in the medieval déshabille of shirts and hose, helped the others to change and put away costumes and props before attending properly to themselves. They worked almost in silence, with just the odd, quick comradely glance as they chaffed Bunting for the howls that pulling off his whiskers occasioned even with the help of patent spirit-gum remover, supplied cold cream, flung malodorous costumes into laundry sacks, swords and crowns into a trunk. Eventually they were left alone. Julian supposed Malcolm had meant this to happen. Perhaps he had too. Suddenly shy, he ducked out of his voluminous shirt. He surfaced to see Malcolm in a characteristic pose, neck cricked to stare at the ceiling as if its damp patches were the first charts of a newly-discovered continent, right hand on his hip, with his dominant left spinning a lid on the dressing table. 

‘You bloody―bloody―bloody―little fool, Fleming.’ 

For a moment, Julian couldn’t think what he meant, and then he remembered the kiss, seeing it now as the audience must have. What an unspeakable clod he had been. How could he have possibly not thought how it would look? He had sent them both up sky high in front of not only the whole school, but home people― 

He took an imploring step forward. ‘Mal―Blake―look, please, I’m sorry―I can’t explain, except that it was―it just felt right―there was absolutely nothing else―’ 

Blake jerked his head down and around, the slightly underbitten jaw that disbarred him from good looks savagely prominent. 

‘―I could have done―I―for what’s it’s worth―I don’t think―oh Christ almighty, I’m _sorry_ ―’ 

Julian reached out; Blake snatched his wrist. The pot-lid rang humming, then clattered, on the concrete floor. Blake tried a hard look, but his soft brown eyes weren’t made to blaze. His head sagged, and he shuddered just as he had in the second after the kiss. His hold loosened, but Julian, half-mesmerised with shame, did not pull away. When Blake’s face rose again it was with a weak, racking laugh. 

‘Julian, _darling_. Why didn’t you―do―say―something _before_?’ Malcolm drew him close; the hand that had held his wrist dropped to the small of his back, the other caressed his nape. Obedient to the conventions of the pose, Julian tilted his neck back, relaxing into the supporting grip and closing his eyes. A competent director would have disposed easily of the lack of discrepancy in their heights; no such person being available, the kiss necessitated a slightly awkward stretch on Malcolm’s part, and it was over sooner than Julian had expected. He did not find it unpleasant; it produced a giddy sensation which he imagined was what drunkenness was like. He was to discover that summer that it was not; though on the whole he liked being tight a good bit less, neither was that to say a very great deal for being kissed. Still, it was rather thrilling, in a vague sort of way, despite the salient and uncomfortable evidence that Malcolm’s excitement was, in kind and degree, of a wholly different order. 

‘Now we shall only have tonight, damn you, when we could have―but look, we’ll have all of it―please tell me we shall.’ 

Dazed at this proposition, barely knowing what it signified, Julian blinked and moved his head from side to side under Malcolm’s right hand. His left began to range over Julian’s bare back. Coming to belated cognisance that he too had arms and hands, lodged inertly around Malcolm’s middle, Julian attempted an equivalent caress, thinking of something he might do to reassure a fretful horse or unhappy ferret. He hoped that was about right. 

‘Oh yes, my dear. Very nice. May I kiss you again?’ 

Julian acquiesced in another smothering assault, during which the errant left hand entered the waistband of his breeches and came gently to rest on his buttock. That was more enjoyable than he could have predicted, and he felt a warm congestion that usually required a certain sort of concentrated thought to achieve. 

‘Oh, my _God_. Oh, dear boy. You will come, won’t you? Promise you'll come. No-one much keeps tabs on Speechers, too many blokes are staying out in hotels with their people and so on, it’ll be perfectly safe. Green’s gone home, completely cleared out, I have the bedroom to myself. You’ll have to leave by the side-door, that’s probably the trickiest part, slip round the side by the rhododendron bush and―I’ll leave the window open, of course―I say, what on earth’s the matter?’ 

His own twitch of arousal had served to make Malcolm’s intentions real; he recoiled from the idea of surrender. Malcolm’s lips grazed his neck and collarbone; his left hand possessed itself of more flesh, fingers entering the cleft. 

‘I just don’t know if I can―’ 

‘ _You’re_ not going out, are you? I thought your mother lived―’ 

Her image flashed upon him, not hard and jagged like a German film, as it had been in the front hall that morning, but as a soft, infinitely sweet place on the reel of memory, a blurred infant summer of grass-seed floating in hazy sunlight, of open arms leading on to a bosom of dove-grey silk. 

‘No, she’s―’ he choked on even the pronoun. ‘I just can’t―I’m a bit highly-strung, or something―’ 

Malcolm straightened; his arms and hands relaxed but did not drop. ‘Julian, dearest―look here, I know you haven’t been around much―it’s one of the reasons I’m attracted―but I _have_ ―what I mean is I shan’t hurt you. I’d die rather than hurt you. And I know how to make it―’ he swallowed, ‘a pleasure for you. More than a pleasure, trust me.’ 

Oh hell, Julian thought, not that old line. ‘I’m not _frightened_ ,’ he said indignantly. ‘I―expect I’m just not― _so_ , all right?’ He swung his hips to dislodge Malcolm’s left hand; it was probably not the most convincing accompanying gesture he had ever made. 

Malcolm snorted and released him. ‘Bollocks, darling. Those tights don’t leave anything to the imagination. You got a stand as soon as I went near your arse.’ 

‘I’m not sure where you got the idea you’d―’ he almost said _woo_ , ‘persuade me by talking filth.’ 

‘Julian, do forgive me. I’m a touch wound up. The play―’ how absurdly quickly, Julian thought, it had receded from both their memories; now it came hurtling back, ‘damn it all, though. You started this. It’s a bit bloody much to expect a man to―’ 

‘ _I_ didn’t.’ 

‘Could have fooled me. _Someone_ planted a sodding great smacker on me in front of ooh, four hundred-odd people. But if it wasn’t you, then I suppose we better let it drop.’ The remnants of brown makeup on his face made his crudely ironical glare seem positively troglodytic. 

‘Malc―don’t. It was just business―no, it wasn’t. It was more than that. But it was Hal kissing Hotspur―not―not―’ 

‘Oh, pull the other one. It’s got Westminster chimes. Christ, Julian, I took a lot of trouble over you. Before you say it, yes, because I think you’ve the makings of an actor, and a damn fine one. A lot of fellows would have just made their dirty pass on day one―’ 

‘I know―thanks for not.’ 

‘―I felt I’d taken on a responsibility. To―what you might become. I had to make absolutely sure I wasn’t spoiling you, either for the stage or for―life. But if you ask me if I was entirely disinterested―well, the answer would have to be no. Not to put to fine a point on it,’ he looked at the floor, flicking the ends of his fingers compulsively against his thumb, as if they were covered in something sticky, ‘I fell in love.’ He glanced up, defiant and prognathous. 

Julian’s knees almost buckled with relief. ‘Thank God. Then you might understand―I’m afraid it doesn’t change things, but you’ll see―I’m most fearfully sorry, but I _didn’t_. I like and admire you awfully, and as far as the stage goes―I’ve never known anyone who’s done as much, so I can quite see I might have seemed a bit wide-eyed and worshipful sometimes, sorry about that―but as far as love goes, no can do. Sorry.’ 

‘What are you saying, you silly boy? You don’t have to be―like and admire’s a perfectly good start. The best there is, in fact. The Greeks would say―’ 

‘Oh, Malcolm, not the Greeks, please. I’m sick of the Greeks. We don’t live in ancient Athens, and that’s flat. I can’t see the use.’ 

‘Very well,’ he said, pouting indulgently. ‘No Greeks. Come here and say _au revoir_ to me. We’ll be missed if we stay much longer.’ 

‘No. You weren’t listening to me. I mean, _I_ don’t want to. I _can’t_. Not unless I love―the person.’ 

‘What?’ Malcolm frowned, nonplussed. 

‘I can’t see how I can put it any more simply. It feels all wrong to me, but I don’t think it would if I were in love.’ 

‘Have you been?’ 

‘No―I don’t think so.’ He remembered that at the end of an avenue of fleeting thought about Hotspur and chivalry had stood Marlow, competent, humorous and practical, almost too quick to perceive the absurdity in a situation. Julian closed his eyes for a fraction of a second longer than a blink and saw the image again; it grinned over its shoulder, ran an impatient hand through its reddish hair and disappeared into a gap. ‘No, not yet. And I know you’ll say _well, then, how can you know?_ But I’m prepared to wait until I am, thanks.’ 

‘But―hang it all, Julian, I’m―you’re―we’re _men_. One of the very few unquestioned benefits is that one doesn’t have to travel in saccharine to answer one’s desires.’ 

‘Benefits? Of what?’ 

‘ _Julian_.’ 

‘Oh. I see. But I meant it. I don’t think I am. Q―’ he reddened, ‘queer, I mean.’ 

Malcolm appeared briefly to consult a higher power. ‘Whatever you say, my dear. Though persistence in that line could get tedious.’ 

‘I don’t know I’m not, either,’ he added slowly, ‘I think for me the person comes first. And that’s why, really―I mean, it’s not just a matter of conventional morals―I’ll only know when I meet that person, and until then I just can’t. It’s a gift, isn’t it? And one can’t give someone a present that’s second hand.’ 

‘You can’t honestly ask me to believe―’ 

‘But it’s true.’ 

Malcolm’s hands rose, clenched and flexed, then dropped back into futility. ‘God, I’m a fucking fool. My last term at school, the one you’re meant to remember glowing with a gleam―bringing you on, coaching you, spending all that time _thinking_ about you, actually _aching_. Wondering if I could be sure of you―sometimes you were so damned provocative I could have thrown you on your knees and―never mind, you wouldn’t like it. There were things I’d like to have done, people I wanted you to meet this summer―Florrie Fuller, for one―’ 

‘But it all depended on my―going to bed with you.’ Julian knew he was shivering; he must be cold, stripped to the waist in this windowless spot, but he felt rather warm. The contours of their surroundings seemed to sharpen as they drained of colour. 

‘No, Julian. It depended on you not having roughly the worldview of a housemaid with her head stuffed full of film stars and orange blossom. Christ, I should have listened to Marlow when he said you were a vacuous little tart.’ 

Julian was surprised by the accuracy of his right hook; he’d taken up boxing last year in the hope of sustaining some injury that would make his looks more rugged, forgetting that it would involve hitting people with whom he had no quarrel. That quickly revealed itself as an activity in which he could not sustain enough interest to develop more than a basic competence, which, unfortunately for his original design, served an instinct for self-preservation he hadn’t known he possessed. The blow sent Malcolm staggering; the skin was intact, but tomorrow he would have to explain a bruise on his cheekbone that might well have filled into a black eye. He caught the edge of the dressing table and pushed himself to his feet with a grunt unsettlingly similar to his amorous ones. Julian steeled himself for the return―perhaps this would be the association that a broken nose or scarred brow would carry for the rest of his life. Malcolm coughed and spat, Julian sensed, for effect. 

‘You did that for him, didn’t you?’ he said, leering viciously, triumphantly. ‘Well, good luck with that, dearie.’ But the look he gave as he gathered his clothes and left was one almost of admiration. 

At least Julian had the gym block showers to himself; it gave him time to get the thing into perspective. He felt bruised and bemused: he had on a few occasions subsequently become friendly with fellows he’d had (once literally) to knock back, but the thing had never happened in reverse. He was an ass for not spotting Malcolm’s interest in him for what it was, and for having let such unsavoury motivations mislead him into thinking his talent was greater than it was. That reflection presented itself in a maternal cadence, reminding him that he had still to face her opinion, which would in all likelihood make allowance for youth and amateurism by drawing pitiless attention to them. Oh well, he would think of it as practice for his future notices: the acerbity of a Shaw or an Ervine could hold no terror for someone who had been subjected to Mrs Fleming’s studied generosity. And then there were Marlow’s reported words. Julian was pretty sure he didn’t have a thing for Marlow, though he had jolly nice eyes, but Malcolm had been perfectly right: he had thrown the punch in some sort of obscure defence of a bloke who held a distinctly poor opinion of him. He tried to square _vacuous little tart_ with Marlow’s friendliness to him earlier and could not. He supposed he was just the sort of person whom nobody took very seriously. 

Those parents who were not taking their sons out for dinner had been invited to tea in the Headmaster’s garden. The _sanctum sanctorum_ aspect of it made Julian’s peers less energetic in their congratulations than they might have been on ground permitted to them in daily life, but it was still more than usually hard to take; he struggled to remember that for them the play had not been irremediably soiled. 

She was seated apart from the family groups, on a wrought-iron seat under a pear tree, holding a cup; as Julian hurried over with apologies she gave it to a maid holding a tray. 

‘It’s a little inconsiderate of you, Julian, but perhaps for the best. I’d like to speak to you, in private and about something important, and small talk with strangers under those conditions is difficult.’ 

That sounded ominous, but there was no escaping it; he offered her his hand. ‘We can walk down that path there, by the pines.’ 

‘Those are deodars.’ 

‘Are they? We call them the pines. Isn’t there a Kipling story?’ 

‘A collection, I believe. I can’t say I care for his work. All those grubby people behaving badly in the colonial service.’ 

When they were out of earshot of the tea-party, she turned to him with a face that brought impassivity to a pitch of strain bordering on hysteria; the tail-end of a long shadow fell across her cheekbone, giving the effect of a Noh mask. 

‘I don’t want this to be a long conversation, and I’m sorry to have to speak to you in this fashion on an occasion which should be a happy one for both of us. I was very pleased to see you get your Colours.’ 

‘That’s nothing, you know. Mine’s a rugger House really, there’s nobody apart from―’ he found he could not get _Marlow_ out, and swallowed dryly, ‘and I’m rotten at rugger. In Kempe's one collects cricket Colours for having the usual number of limbs and a cheerful attitude, pretty much. If I were in Maddox’s it would be different―’ 

'Julian, don’t _prattle_. I’m afraid my pleasure in that achievement was overshadowed by a far greater dismay at your performance this afternoon. I can’t approve your wasting time in such a fashion.’ 

‘Everyone has to do something that’s not work. Games take up more time if―’ 

‘Don’t interrupt me, please. It was very kind of that young man we met this morning to say that the play was a collective effort, but my impression was very different. You drew attention to yourself so consistently and so meretriciously that I could scarcely bear to watch. In fact, had I not been in the middle of the row I should certainly have left.’ 

‘You could have gone at the interval,’ he said mechanically. 

‘I shall endeavour to forget that piece of impertinence. You would have humiliated yourself and me no less had I not been there to see it. I have never encouraged you to place excessive value on your looks, and it was a profound shock to see you exploit them for cheap effect in a way that might be forgivable in a chorus-girl, but is revolting in a man.’ 

‘I was playing a part, Mother―vain, frivolous―that’s what Prince Hal is like at the beginning―’ 

‘It was a character altogether too close to your own to watch with any degree of equanimity. These are not points for discussion, Julian. This afternoon you gave an exhibition of self-conscious charm that made me want to sink through the ground with shame. Not only for you and me but for your father’s memory.’ 

A deep flush rose to his cheeks; he barely contained an impulse to claw at them. Her inscrutability had been replaced by a look of―nothing as vulgar as satisfaction. Consummation. She had discharged a duty and was experiencing the quiet sense of fulfillment that attends time selflessly and productively spent. She was not cruel; it might be easier to dismiss and hate her if she were. She took no pleasure in disassembling him, piece by piece. But what she would call her _self-respect_ , her sense of herself as a scrupulous person who did not shrink from painful truth, was more important to her than he was. Which meant, he supposed, that she did not love him and never had. She would change him for Hotspur in a Sam Browne. And if his mother did not love him, whoever could? He felt a disassociated, tingly bewilderment, like seasickness. It had to do with fathers somehow, with his father, himself mysteriously tainted by dissipation. 

‘I’m sorry you see it like that,’ he choked. 

‘I don’t view it as a matter of opinion. I would prefer it if you didn’t act again while you are at school. Once you leave―well, you will be a man then, and not subject to my wishes in the same way. But you know what I think, and that you would not wish to hurt me.’ 

‘Yes, all right. Let’s please not talk about it again. Not ever.’ 

‘I think that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day.’ She consulted her delicate wristwatch. ‘My car is at seven. Perhaps you’ll show me to the drive?’ 

He did, managing to make conversation about the architecture of the school and the personalities of some of the masters as he did so. But to wave her from the front steps, as he had done on two previous Speech Days, he found impossible, turning away as soon as he’d seen her into the cab. He slipped to the side door of his House, and gazed over at the rhododendrons growing alongside Malcolm’s window. He might knock, throw a note in or just push it open: Malcolm was the sort in whom hope sprang eternal. But it simply wouldn’t do. That night, as every night for the next seven years and more, Julian spent alone.


	3. Motion in one sphere

‘I’m terribly sorry, Uncle Malc. I’m so disappointed. Alan Howard’s supposed to be _super_. It really is a ghastly one, completely smothering.’

‘It sounds it, my dear. I hope your flatmate’s looking after you. Linctus and hot-water bottles, all that sort of thing.’ 

‘She is―without a bit of fuss. It is handy to have a nurse around.’ His niece sneezed violently. 

‘We’ll go when you’re well again. You toddle off to bed, and don't worry. Good night.’ 

He put down the phone. Theatre-going was a staple of his uncle-routine, but he was not sure he had any gust for six hours of Plantagenet paternity issues without Honor’s mischievous, spritely presence to sustain him. Of the two friends who might be persuaded to take the spare ticket, Kenneth would drone lugubriously about fifty-year moratoria on Shakespeare, and Keith would discourse drunkenly on the relative merits of the juveniles’ rear ends. He should just return the tickets, and book for later in the run. Except the sense of relief he felt at that decision arose from a cowardice forty years old. It was bloody ridiculous. He’d survived the war, survived _Changi_ ―not that Changi was the worst, it was very far from the worst the Pacific had to offer. But they’d only put on _Hamlet_ and _Othello_ in Changi. The rest had been Rod and Frank’s deplorable three-hander farces, just an excuse, really, for Sean to wear a negligée for as much stage time as they could contrive. A scene of Doll Tearsheet wouldn’t have satisfied Changi. And who would volunteer to play Falstaff on a quarter-pound of rice and a pint of shark-broth a day? Great God, though―what sort of a lily-livered loon was he, to avoid it on the grounds of a schoolboy humiliation? Mere self-respect demanded he go. 

The whole enterprise was jinxed, he thought, as the PA declared that Mr Mason was indisposed―no doubt with the same plague that had laid Honor low―and his part would be taken by Julian Mansell. He flipped idly through the programme―Mansell would usually be playing Worcester in Part One and the Lord Chief Justice in Part Two. Neither casting suggested that he would rise to Falstaff with much aplomb. If it was too dreary to be borne he could leave at the first interval. 

The play began energetically, with the King established as aggressive and moody, his court dingy and paranoid. You could easily understand why this Hal―a confused, tow-haired charmer with a gift to arouse protective instincts―had sought solace in Eastcheap. Mirroring the Prince’s blustering insecurities, Falstaff offered the simple certainties of dissolution. Malcolm didn’t know if he was a _good_ Falstaff, exactly, but he was certainly a very, very nice one. He was stout enough not to need much padding to fill his scarlet suit, but it was a mobile, graceful obesity, the physique of a light cruiserweight gone horribly to seed. And he was clean-shaven; what an extraordinary difference that made, insinuating somehow that under a flashy and superficial charm, he just might be collecting material for blackmail. 

Malcolm found himself unmoved by Hotspur, played as a rough, simple brute. And stuttering seemed to have gone right out, replaced with the accent of a Tyneside docker. That was probably just as well. What a different play it seemed when the Prince was viewed as a vacillator between two father-figures, rather than as protagonist who, with an antagonist at the zenith of his pride, comes belatedly into his own. Malcolm, who could occasionally be found congratulating himself on not being a fuddy-duddy, thought he liked the new way better. 

Their playing of the mock-audience in Two, Four showed an edge of strain―both clearly coming to it cold, with an understudy rehearsal a fairly distant memory. Fascinated, Malcolm saw that it was Falstaff who was providing the support; testing his interlocutor with new moves, drawing out of a languid, aloof Prince an unexpectedly hectic mummer. With _banish plump Jack, and banish all the world_ his face opened into terrifying, unfathomable need, a lovelessness that could indeed devour all the world and still not be satiated. Bounding from the table, the Prince took Falstaff’s hand with the courtesy of a bridegroom, and said, ‘I do. I will.’ The parody could hardly have been more painful had he kissed him. 

Loathing the twenty minutes which was never sufficient time in which to do anything, while always being too tediously long in which to do nothing, Malcolm milled aimlessly about the bar with a cigarette and a gin and tonic. There was a fair bit of buzz about the astonishingly good understudy, of whom nobody seemed to have heard. Malcolm supposed he must be roughly his own age; he wondered if he’d stuck with it would he have reached the towering pinnacle of Worcester, Lord Chief Justice and understudy Falstaff for the RSC? He doubted it: a few years banging about the provincial rep circuit had been enough to cure him of stagestroke. Most actors, if they were the genuine article, had a bad fairy show up at their christenings to pronounce the curse: _may you never have a good break, may you never be able to do anything else_. Malcolm grinned privately, thinking of his growing brood of godchildren. But he was the other sort. 

They went back in to a crudely-played Glendower; Malcolm marvelled at the propensity, clearly shared by the Bard, of his countrymen to find Welsh accents in and of themselves side-splitting. The King overdid it a bit in his scene with Hal. A voice reached him over the abyss of the war and a quarter-century of meetings, conferences and lectures attended in a Library Association tie: _positively masticating the flats, my dear. Do I mean masticating?_ Falstaff and Bardolph bickering perfunctorily with the Hostess, for all the world like a bunch of hennaed old queens at a party that had been going on far too long four hours ago. What madly queer plays they were. Had he seen that at nineteen? He thought perhaps he had, and plunged away from it in horror towards the back-slapping sublimations and virile sentimentalities of Hotspur. 

And then he saw it, or rather who. The gesture was somewhat exaggerated, as befitted these permissive times, but identical in shape and force: _why, an otter...Neither fish nor flesh_ ―well, that was spot on, Malcolm thought coarsely, but if he could have found a way to have him―well, ancient history, and now he was paunchier and balder than Malcolm was himself. But the famous cranial structure was still there, under the heavy hatching and loose flesh. No, but it was absurd. An hallucination. But, on the other hand, what could be likelier? If there ever was an infant over whose cradle Carabosse had hovered, it was Julian Fleming. The name-change was probably Equity-mandated, his mother’s maiden name or something, that was what people usually did. 

He sunk the rest of the play first in trying to work out if his eyes had deceived him, and then, when he was quite sure they hadn’t, exactly how he felt about it. His lack of surprise surprised him, as did the absence of any stronger emotion than nostalgic curiosity. There was quite some time to kill before Part Two began; after a plate of pasta in a poky trat., he strolled round to the Marquess of Anglesea for a g&t. A few of the cast had had the same idea; Alan Howard was talking to a chap who looked like Press as he spooned mustard onto a plate of sausages, while Mistress Quickly stood her dread sovereign and Bardolph pints of Young’s. It would be altogether too much if he were here too, Malcolm thought, a coincidence belonging rather to the world of the comedies than the histories. With characteristic timing, Julian stepped out of the Gents. He looked around him vaguely, personably, rather as he had at the curtain call, before joining his colleagues at the bar. Without makeup, costume, or Falstaff’s gait, he was unmistakable despite the run to fat: Malcolm, who these days teetered disconsolately around fourteen and a half stone, estimated he gave Julian at least three. He had lost none of his instinctive grace; it was, if anything, magnified by his bulk. The wrinkles and bloat lines came out of a box: age had been kind to his complexion even as it had loosened the flesh on his jaw and doubled his chin. Malcolm supposed that what he was thinking was _I still would, Christ yes, and without a second thought,_ and when their eyes met, he was probably wearing a leer to match the sentiment. 

The moment of seemed both of infinite and infinitesimal duration, like one of those speeded-up films of plant tropisms: wary enquiry followed by confirmed recognition, an assessment of the possibility of retreat by an admission of its hopelessness, then a repeat of the first movement, amplified into the social pantomime of _Can it be―? Imagine meeting you here!_ Malcolm wanted to vanish, to be erased from the annals of humanity. Instead he stood up and took Julian’s outstretched hand. 

‘Hullo―it is Blake, isn’t it? Malcolm Blake? Fancy running into you after all this―and what an extraordinary coincidence that it should happen now. Oh, dear. It’s all coming out rather muddled, you must think I’m potty. And I haven’t much time to explain. I’ve got to be back at work in about five minutes―’ 

‘I know. I was―will be―there―at―at the theatre, I mean.’ 

‘ _Really_. How absolutely astounding.’ His voice dropped, tawny-soft with sincerity. Malcolm felt an absurd but undeniable amorous twitch. ‘It’s one of those things that must be meant, isn’t it? You must think me very superstitious, but you’d be astonished how often―’ 

‘Jools―’ Mistress Quickly called. 

‘Hang on a tick, Lal―I really have to go. Takes a bit of time to pad and make up, you know. Look here, you must meet me after the show. Come to Luigi’s―you know it?’ 

‘Yes―Tavistock Street.’ 

‘That’s the one―do come, Malcolm. Promise me you’ll come.’ 

Robbed of speech, he nodded. Julian turned and followed his companions. Malcolm sat down with a bump, breathing stertorously and groping for his cigarettes. He wasn’t sure he’d heard the last four words aright: indeed, he was almost sure he hadn’t. One more g &t in the pub and another in the Aldwych bar did not help him reach a conclusion. 

The larger part of an audience to the second part of _Henry IV_ is probably always counting the moments to Falstaff’s next appearance on stage; no doubt some subtle souls prefer Hal with his father, and some perverse ones the machinations of Westmoreland and Prince John. But it is also safe to say that few among that majority desire Sir John's return with the sensuous intensity that Malcolm did that evening. Julian was on riotous form, alternating between supreme loveability and breathtaking turpitude at almost every moment. His scenes with the Lord Chief Justice were uproarious; the lowly spear-carrier deputised into Julian’s usual part took every opportunity to twit him with what were presumably his own inflections, and he thrived on it. 

Poins and the Prince fleetingly caught Malcolm’s attention―his own last love-affair had concluded three years ago in just such a mood of affectless cruelty, and dirty linen (of the literal sort) had been the catalyst for that too. Then, with some brief interruption to not a word of which he attended, back to the perpetual dogged party in the Boar's Head: it was still going on, but by now some screechy little piece―no, two of them, had got a shiv out. _Fucking charpies’ll be up to us next, dearie, you watch_ , said the voice from the other side of Styx. That party was supposed to be over, of course, dissolved into the Sexual Offences Act and universal blue jeans, and Malcolm was sincerely baffled by those who seemed sorry to be shot of it. But he suspected Eastcheap was always still going on somewhere. 

Doll Tearsheet was unfortunately ill at ease with emotional lability, and Julian, uncharacteristically, gave her little assistance in weathering the swells and troughs. Malcolm hoped he was not already worn out by earlier bravura, and passed their stilted dialogue by indulging himself in a little harmless speculation which meant he lost most of King Henry’s insomniac anguish in incredulous amusement at himself. Had he been mentally undressing the very personification of impotent debauchery? He rather thought he had, and the physical corollary to his reverie supported the hypothesis. Corpulence was not his usual style, but here was superfluity, pliancy and resilience that he would thrill equally to conquer or yield to. 

He filled the interval with similar fantasy and more gin. It was one answer to the wretched recesses, but the circumstances were rarely so serendipitous, he considered as the curtain rose on an Arcadia of pig-sties and middens. 

He had expected his eyes perhaps to blur at _I know thee not, old man_ , not that they should flood at _we have heard the chimes at midnight_ , necessitating a yawn and blink; then spill, requiring the office of a handkerchief, at _I’ll ne’er bear a base mind_. The trick of Feeble was to make the shift to ferocity without losing the effeminate manner, and this boy did it to a turn―oh, he saw with a gasp he hoped was not audible, _not_ a boy, but the woman who played Mistress Quickly. Falstaff’s excoriation of the vice of lying cleared his vision, despite its leaning heavily towards melancholy and away from bitchery. 

What a vicious little bit of stuff Prince John was, the pretty policeman type. Julian carried off the farce with Colville satisfactorily, but the panegyric to sack was mistimed and muted. Moved by the threesome of father, son and crown more because he felt a sensible person ought to be than because he was, Malcolm nonetheless felt the jest-book atavism of the Jerusalem Chamber legend as a kind of tragedy. 

Revels in Gloucestershire had reached the solipsistic stage when Pistol broke in with the news of the old King’s death. Julian’s face twisted into gross cupidity― _no_ , Malcolm thought, _there was so much more to it_ and then saw that he’d been taken in―upon _the young king is sick for me_ it broke once again into that boundless, unappeasable, oceanic neediness. He could not look. He must look. 

Henry, the Fifth of that name, turned to glare down a river of shimmering cloth of gold. 

_I know thee not, old man_. 

The actor playing Henry could start reading from the phonebook after _fall to thy prayers_ , no one gives a damn about him or his pieties and bans. Only Shakespeare could get away with something as perfectly simple: at his moment of ultimate ignominy, Falstaff upstages his king. 

Falstaff reeled, then froze, somehow suggesting a mannequin being taken apart, section by section, powerless to reconstitute himself or his world. Malcolm remembered the liberating troops and the Red Cross personnel, the revulsion that they couldn’t keep from the eyes above deep, compassionate voices asking the questions that you flinched, then fled from. 

Julian stumbled, clutching his heart, not his jaw, but in that moment Malcolm recognised him ice-hearted, inhuman, a changeling, stolen at birth and dedicated to the profession. He knew Malcolm was in the audience, and despite that― _because of it_ , it wasn’t as if he did this every night, after all―Christ, _actors_. He probably honestly thought Malcolm would be flattered. (Malcolm was.) Falstaff drew himself to his feet with a groan of consummation, grimacing in discomfited triumph― _I know everything I need to, ducky, no fear and no favour_. But the look he threw after the King’s retreating back was one of melting admiration. 

Malcolm disapproved of standing ovations, a transatlantically demonstrative habit. As the cast returned to the stage for the curtain call, he rose weeping to his feet. 

Luigi’s was still busy. The maitre d’ assured Malcolm a table was just being cleared and invited him to wait for his friend at the bar. Feeling foolish, but somehow compelled, _enchanted_ , he ordered a bottle of champagne (N.V. Moët) to be brought to the table, and his (count them) fifth gin and tonic (that was all right) of the day. If he truly felt the self-reproaches he was rehearsing, he told himself sternly, he would cancel the order and leave, while the chance of mortifyingly encountering Julian on the street was still something short of a certainty. There was self-indulgence in his ideally-imagined end to the evening, which he owned as an unlikelihood, but little enough in desiring a renewal of old acquaintance, an end to unfinished business. His heart galloped and thundered. 

After the door had opened twice to admit patrons who were not Julian, Malcolm caught the barman looking at him with a studied lack of pity and consciously practised self-control. So he missed the entrance of the woman who joined him at the bar, leaving a tactful two stools between them. She was in her well-preserved late sixties, he judged, wearing a bouclé shift whose apple-green colour, rather than its cut, proclaimed it a purchase of a decade or so ago, when her hair―snowy in a way peculiar to former redheads―could still be tinted to a respectable facsimile of its youthful shade. Her air of prosperity had a certain self-assurance about it―a career woman, obviously. She ordered champagne (he caught a murmured _’70_ , so decidedly not cooking Moët), to be brought to the table when her husband arrived. Her settled, humorous face wore a look of unembarrassed impatience at her own ostentation. She tapped her fingers around the martini she’d ordered for the interim. Her glance ran along the bar, took in Malcolm as an object of uninterest, and fell ravenously upon his cigarettes. 

He wordlessly offered the packet. 

‘Thanks,’ she said, accepting his light, ‘I’m supposed to have given up.’ 

‘But even with a drink in them one’s hands always feel so appallingly empty, somehow.’ 

‘Quite.’ 

Her expression had grown, in a well-bred, reserved way, mildly commiserating. Her work must have involved a measure of trust, he thought: perhaps a solicitor with a fat practice in family law: she knew how to invite and repel a confidence at once. 

‘Chap I’m dining with gets off late.’ 

‘Yes, my husband works unsocial hours. As a matter of fact, he got a sort of promotion today. A very temporary one. But I thought I’d drop in―he’s a regular here―and surprise him: one of his colleagues rang me; he doesn’t know I know yet.’ 

Malcolm hoped that his slight surprise that a man of her husband’s presumed age should not be retired, let alone in line for promotion, had not been evident. He thought he could picture the type, though: driven, lean, dryly witty, hard on himself as a matter of principle rather than utility and yet complacent in the most unpredictable places. Shunted into a sinecure for the last year or so of his employment, doubtless because he drove both superiors and subordinates dotty. 

A tall, dark silhouette appeared against the frosted glass of the door. 

‘Oh,’ the woman said, a touching pleasure lighting her face into girlishness, ‘here he is now.’ 

The door opened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The production of the two parts of _Henry IV_ depicted here is based loosely on the 1975 RSC Histories cycle, though I'm imagining that this chapter takes place c.1972.

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title is from _Return to Night_ ; chapter titles from _Henry IV Part One_ , V, iv.


End file.
